Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

February 09, 2018

I’ll get into the whence and wherefore of this brand name in just a bit. But before I do, an observation: It’s never a good idea to pick a name for your company and its namesake product that is also the name of a widely promoted festish-y photo site. Needless to say, the founder of HelloTushy.com (the subject of this post) didn’t ask me about Tushy.com (the fetish-y one), or I wouldn’t be writing this preamble.

May 27, 2016

I’m over at the Strong Language blog today with a story about a Hollywood recording studio that recorded some of the biggest names of the 1960s and 1970s: the Doors, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Linda Ronstadt. The studio’s own name was the acronym T.T.G., which may have stood for “Two Terrible Guys.” Or it may have stood for a Yiddish-Arabic expression that was considerably swearier.

December 29, 2015

The WOTY party has begun, and I’m arriving fashionably (or maybe just breathlessly) late. Back in early November, Allan Metcalf nominated basic for the honor; a couple of weeks later Dennis Baron, aka Dr. Grammar, anointed singular they and Oxford Dictionaries selected an emoji, “Face with Tears of Joy.” Merriam-Webster, which chooses its WOTY based on volume of online lookups, selected -ism. The spoofy Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum (named after “Emily’s third cousin, twice removed – at her request”) has been posting one WOTY candidate every day in December, along with runners-up. (I confess I’d never heard of Dick Poop, but I like it.) And over at the Visual Thesaurus (where I’m a contributing writer), Ben Zimmer has nominated a couple dozen notable words that surfaced this year in science, business, news, and pop culture.

Most outrageous: Measles party, schlonged (tie – it was an outrageous year!)

Most unnecessary: Microaggression

Most productive: -shaming

Read on for the full WOTY list – 20 words in all – and brief definitions. Words previously featured on this blog are linked to the relevant posts. And follow the American Dialect Society for news of its WOTY vote on January 8.

December 18, 2015

Lucy Kellaway,who writes about language and writing for the Financial Times,has created Guffipedia, “a repository for the worst jargon I’ve seen over the years.” All the devils are here: onboard more resource, flex-pon-sive, diverse hairdos, etc. ad nauseam. “The point of Guffipedia,” writes Kellaway, “is not just for you to admire the extent of my guff collection, but to help me curate it going forward, as they say in Guffish.” Good point of entry: the many Guffish euphemisms for you’re fired. (Hat tip: Molly Walker.)

December 22, 2014

Gefatke: A pancake made of chopped fish and grated potatoes. A portmanteau of gefilte (literally “stuffed”) fish and latke; both words are Yiddish in origin.

“We already have the Cronut, crookie and pretzel croissant,” writes Michele Henry, a staff reporter for the Toronto Star. “Why not the gefatke? Or is it a lafilte?”

Latkes, Henry reminds us, are traditionally eaten at Hanukkah, the eight-day festival of lights that ends this year at sundown December 24. “But, at most other times of the year, we lavish holiday tables with different goodies, including a sort of fish-loaf — shaped into pucks and poached — called gefilte fish. It’s an acquired taste.” (It’s also the perfect substrate for the hottest horseradish you can tolerate.)

Henry continues:

Still, this nice Jewish girl thought we’d be remiss, in this age of hybrid foods, not to squash together two of my culture’s most storied dishes, turning gefilte fish and latke into gefatke (or, if you prefer, lafilte).

She enlisted Toronto chef, restaurateur “and member of the tribe” Anthony Rose to realize her vision. Then her Star colleague tweaked it just a bit, adding some Thai fish sauce for a little extra flavor. (Recipe here.)

As a portmanteau, gefatke lacks the recognizability of last year’s Thanksgivukkah. The inclination is to rhyme the stressed second syllable with cat, which suggests an unwelcome (though probably not inaccurate) connection with dietary fat; latke, by contrast, rhymes roughly with plot-keh. (The vowel sound in ke is a schwa.) The alternative, lafilte, is just too Frenchy for this dish.

The recipe, however, sounds delish. If you’re in New York, you may want to make your gefatkes (or whatever you call them) with artisanalgefilte fish from the nicely named Gefilteria. Or you can make your own gefilte fish from this recipe, courtesy of the equally nicely named Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen in San Francisco.

There are no sons named Wise at Wise Sons. The deli takes its name from the “wise son” of the Passover ritual. The Jewish year 5771 translates (approximately, depending on the precise date) to the civil year 2011.

Happy Hanukkah and, as Julia Child would have said in Israel, b’te-avon!

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers (only $19.95 a year!). Here’s a shortish excerpt:

Bookish: This word has meant “literary” or “enthusiastic about reading” since the mid-16th century. When attached to a noun, ish gives the sense of belonging to that thing or person, or having its nature or character. Many noun + ish blends express disparagement: consider childish, sluggish, shrewish, foolish, selfish, and many others. Other times, as with bookish (or feverish or freakish), the sense is neutral. In addition to the Berkeley bookstore, there’s an ebook reader called Booki.sh, which uses the Saint Helena country-code domain extension .sh.

I figured someone would ask about Ish Kabibble, so even though he’s unrelated to the topic at hand I did some research.

Ish Kabibble was the stage name of Merwyn Bogue (1907-1994 or 1908-1993, depending on the source), a cornet player in Kay Kyser’s big band. The origin of the pseudonym is debated. Here’s an excerpt from the World Wide Words entry:

This dismissive slang expression came into existence in the USA quite suddenly around 1913 with the ostensible meaning “I should worry!”, which means, of course, “Don’t worry!” or “Who cares?”. It had quite a vogue for a decade or two and was the name of a character played by Merwyn Bogue on a 1930s radio show called Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge (they don’t make titles like that any more).

Those of us who sift the detritus of language for fun and profit are intrigued by it. It looks and sounds Yiddish and the phrases nish gefidlt, nicht gefiedelt, and ich gebliebte have all been suggested as sources. The idea of a Jewish connection was reinforced in 1914 when Harry Hershfield began his cartoon strip Abie the Agent in Hearst newspapers, which featured the car salesman Abraham (“Abie”) Kabibble.

Many people at the time certainly thought it was Yiddish, and it’s notable that some Anglicised it to “I should bibble” or “we should bibble”. But it was equally firmly said by contemporaries that no Yiddish connection existed at all.

What not to name the baby, San Francisco version. Tips for techies: “You have the added handicap of being in a field where naming products comes up all the time. You probably even think you're good at it. Unfortunately for fetuses, there is a pretty big difference between names that would be appropriate for a baby and names appropriate for a wearable pedometer.” (Via Nancy’s Baby Names.)

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Speaking of babies, Neil Whitman was recently baffled by a product called Babiators: “All at once, not only did I have to infer the existence of aviators as a noun referring to a kind of eyewear instead of a group of airplane pilots; I also had to take it in as part of an offensively cute portmanteau word, in a display for a product that shouldn’t even exist.”

May 20, 2013

Shmeat: Meat grown in a laboratory from animal cells; the objectives include reducing animal cruelty and increasing the global supply of affordable protein. “Shmeat” is a portmanteau of “sheet” and “meat.”

An undated article on a website called Shmeat.com (apparently operated by SavingAdvice.com) explains the process:

Cells are harvested from a live animal, such as a chicken, pig or cow. The cells are then placed in a special solution of nutrients which mimics the qualities of blood. This nutrient solution will help the cells to multiply where they can then be secured to a spongy sheet which has been soaked with nutrient solution. The sheet is then stretched to increase cell size and protein content. It’s from the combination of this “sheet meat” that shmeat derives its name.

Shmeat was the subject of “Building a $325,000 Burger,”a May 14, 2013, story in the New York Times. Reporting from the Netherlands, where researcher Mark Post has created a proof-of-concept shmeat patty, science writer Henry Fountain noted that the burger “was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous.” Fountain went on:

“This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.”

The origins of “shmeat” are uncertain. The earliest citation I could find is in a December 5, 2008, column by Lou Bendrick (“Meet Shmeat”) in the online environmental magazine Grist:

Test-tube meat is also known as in vitro meat, cultured meat, victimless meat, vat-grown meat, hydroponic meat, and, finally, shmeat. (Note to self: Be sure to apply for inevitable X Prize to rename this stuff.)

For now, let’s call it shmeat.

Shmeat is grown from a cell culture (hence the in vitro or cultured prefixes), not from a live animal. These harvested cells are taken from an animal, such as a pig, and placed in a “nutrient-rich medium” that mimics blood. Once the cells multiply they are attached to a spongy scaffold or sheet (sheet + meat = shmeat) that has been soaked with nutrients and stretched to increase cell size and protein content.

“Also known as” suggests that “shmeat” had already entered the vocabulary, but I couldn’t find an earlier citation.

As Bendrick jokingly points out, and as the title of his column underscores, “shmeat” is not a felicitous name for a serious product. (Shortly after the Grist column appeared, a commenter on the Offalgood website said “shmeat” was “a horrible name, it sounds like what you get when you cross shit and meat.”)

Obligatory Urban Dictionary addendum: “Shmeat: Small penis or dick, also reffering [sic] to any person or anything. It can be used for anything anyone and anything can be a shmeat.” Posted November 27, 2006, a full two years before the Grist column.

April 25, 2013

Remember Shpock (“Your mobile yard sale for beautiful things”) and Shpoonkle (“Justice you can afford!”)? This farshtinkener naming trend is still trending. I recently learned about Schmap, which calls its product “the world’s first Twitter-powered city guides.” (The official spelling includes two shoe-print exclamation marks, but I refuse to play that game.)

Schmap isn’t new: the company was founded in 2004 in Carrboro, North Carolina, and published its first guides in 2006. A TechCrunch article about Schmap’s new Demographics Pro service, which provides detailed reports on Twitter followers, brought it to my attention.

Here’s the thing about these Sh- and Sch- names: they aren’t neutral. For starters, Sh- and especially Shm- suggest “Yiddish.” Those phonemes show up at the beginning of dozens of Yiddish words; my copy of Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish has 42 pages of sh- words, from shabbes to shvitzer. (The sch- spelling, Rosten noted elsewhere, is German rather than Yiddish.)

I’m sure Carrboro, North Carolina – “the Paris of the Piedmont” – is a lovely place, but I somehow doubt that you’ll hear a lot of Yiddish along its leafy boulevards.

It gets worse, because sh- and shm- carry a stigma: They’re “prefatory sounds, of mockery or dismissal, that ‘pooh-pooh’ the word they prefix,” writes Rosten:

A great many words of mockery and aspersion, words that jeer, sneer and scorn…begin with sh-: shlemiel, shlimazl, shloomp, shmegegge, shmo, shmuck, shnorrer.

Shm- words show up so frequently in snarky, Yiddish-inflected rhymes that linguists have a name for the category: shm-reduplication, “a form of reduplication in which the original word or its first syllable (the base) is repeated with the copy (the reduplicant) beginning with shm- (sometimes schm-), pronounced /ʃm/.” As the old punchline has it, “Oedipus-Shmoedipus – as long as he loves his mother!” (See also Libros Schmibros and Burglar Schmurglar. )

So nu? What’s with this fad-shmad? Here’s my guess: A generation of entrepreneurs has been influenced by schwag and schwing, two made-up words that caught on about 20 years ago. I wrote about this effect in a 2011 post, “Swag and Schwag”:

Sometime in the early 1990s swag became schwag, “perhaps after words of Yiddish origin” such as shmuck, says the OED—although Yinglish schlock (something of inferior quality) seems an equally likely influence. (Of course, one must never underestimate the influence of Wayne’s World [1988-1994] and schwing.)Besides being a synonym for bad marijuana, schwag can also be a modifier meaning simply “inferior.”

I appreciated a well-crafted playful name as much as the next wordslinger. But if you want your brand to be taken seriously, be careful with those fancy-shmancy coinages.